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The key to designing a great workflow for your company is making it consistent and repeatable for every job. This creates the “groove” where your staff becomes accustomed to completing the steps in order to accurately and efficiently complete a job.

Below is a simple, but typical workflow to manage every step of a roofing job.

Simple Roofing Workflow

However, not every job is the same and a manager may need to deviate from the standard workflow. The reasons for this are numerous but we see deviations due to job type (i.e. retail vs. insurance), unexpected trades, or even because of an opportunity to capture market share (i.e. your company is the first one in a “honey-hole” cul-de-sac).

With Contractor’s Cloud, we make it easy for a manager to take the workflow in a different direction with our “Questions” criteria. Below you can see the simple question of “Is this an insurance job?”.

If the sales representative answers “yes”, additional milestones/steps can be injected into the workflow that may require additional information to be uploaded, certain tasks to be assigned, or custom email/text notifications to be delivered.

Below, we can see the new “Collect & Review Insurance Paperwork” as been injected immediately after the previous milestone.

In this case, it appears two files are required to be uploaded (Materials & Colors Form and a Scope of Loss document). In addition, a task is created for the In-House Adjuster, Peter Parker, notifying him to start working up the claim.

Having a solid and consistent workflow is important. But being able to efficiently react to certain situations within job is what differentiates a great contractor from a good one.

Contractor’s Cloud provides the most customizable and automated workflow system on the market. If you believe in having total control over your process, check us out today.

There is quite a debate nowadays on whether to use QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks Desktop for your business. In a nutshell, QuickBooks Online is easier to use and obviously more mobile. However, QuickBooks Desktop still way more powerful in its job costing, reporting, and other deep accounting functionality.

You are going to have to do your research to determine which version is best for you. Work with your accountant, your staff, and our account managers to determine what features and functionality are important for your company.

Here are some great articles I came across to help guide you in your QuickBooks decision making process.

Most of our Contractor’s Cloud customers use some version of QuickBooks and way over half of them integrate their QuickBooks Online or Desktop with Contractor’s Cloud. However, that number is quickly rising since the release of our QuickBooks Online integration.

Contractor’s Cloud customers are able to create, schedule, and manage material orders within our program. This includes tracking suppliers, designating drop locations, creating special notes, and managing costs.

The titles you give your sales representatives are definitely a personal choice for your business. Maybe you spend a lot of time in determining your company brand which includes the titles you give to your staff. Or maybe, you have never given it a single thought.

Here is a list of common titles given to sales representatives sampled from the top 600 Contractor’s Cloud customers.

Now there is nothing wrong with using Sales Representative as a suitable title. One school of thought is there is a tremendous sense of pride being labeled a Sales Representative. Another school of thought is there is a stigma attached to the title. This stigma or the possible desire to bring a fresh approach to the industry have caused owners to become creative with their rep titles.

Below is a chart of the 11 most popular asphalt shingle colors (out of roughly 215 shingle colors) installed by Contractor’s Cloud customers between January 1, 2015 to November 1, 2017. It’s probably no surprise, but at least we have quantified the data.

The data shows percentages of nearly 700,000 squares of shingles installed by our top 250 customers from all parts of the United States.

Competition has driven most shingle manufacturers to come up with variations of the same color name. For instance, GAF, Tamko, CertainTeed all have a weathered wood color. Arguably, weathered wood and driftwood are the same.

Within Contractor’s Cloud, our roofing contractor’s are able to look up what colors are installed in a city or zip code within a report, and then give that to a potential customer for review. This provides an amazing value added service to the end homeowner.

Note, the top five makes and models installed are all architectural styled shingles. This shows that most American homeowners prefer the architectural style over the traditional 3-tab shingle style.

Even though CertainTeed takes the top shingle installed, GAF holds the most squares installed with 27.44% with their Timberline HD, Royal Sovereign, and ArmorShield II models combined.

Within Contractor’s Cloud, our roofing contractor’s are able to create, schedule, and manage all of their roofing work orders and material orders complete with colors, sizes, and costs. It’s an amazing and innovative way for them to succeed with their production efforts.

Our customers providing the data are mainly insurance restoration contractors that specialize in roofing, siding, gutters, and windows from all over the country. They are able to enter and track claim numbers, dates of loss, and deductibles for their customers (homeowners) within the Contractor’s Cloud claim tracking interface. This data greatly helps our contractors provide faster and higher quality service for their homeowners.

You probably spend a lot of time determining where your marketing efforts should be spent. You hear you should do this or you’ve read you should do that. Well, let our general customer data help you focus your efforts.

Below, is a chart of common lead source categories based on a sample of around 400,000 opportunities from our top 500 roofing and/or exteriors restoration contractors.

As you can see, most of our customer’s opportunities come from a previous customer or referral. Therefore, this shows that taking care of your customer after the sale is extremely important. Not only will you gain work from someone whom you’ve already sold, but they in return they will become your best sales generator through referrals.

Coming in 3rd is the Internet category. This includes all of your Social Media, Website, SEO, etc. Since the writing of this blog, we have added Social Media as a stand alone category and will keep an eye on it for a future blog.

We ran this data for all opportunities prior to January 1, 2014 and again for all opportunities after January 1, 2014 and the results were similar except for internet based leads are climbing the chart.

Note: with Contractor’s Cloud, you are able to create custom lead sources using any of the above standard categories and track them within our versatile custom lead source report.

In conclusion, based off of what our customers are currently doing, if you are investing most of your marketing dollars in traditional methods such as telemarketing, direct mail, flyers, newspapers, and even email marketing, maybe you should rethink where your marketing dollars are going.

For nearly 8-years, we have been working with contractors all over North America. We know industry trends and have a vast amount of experience in how contracting businesses are being run today.

It’s been an amazing experience meeting contractors and helping them with the challenges they face. In fact, these challenges are the to-do list we use for our future development. More often than not, those challenges are similar in nature whether you are on the east coast, west coast, or somewhere in the middle.

If you are having issues with your technology based organization, give us a call today. It may be the opportunity you’ve been waiting for.

Not sure who Rhonda is and how she applies, but it certainly is a well-known catchy phrase.

Regardless, we are proud to introduce our new interactive base. We are replacing all of our downloadable PDF training manuals with the interactive help. The entire idea is to make it easier and faster to learn Contractor’s Cloud.

Using the new knowledge base in addition with spending time with your account representative for real-time online training, you are guaranteed to learn the ins-and-outs of Contractor’s Cloud at a fast pace.

The new knowledge base allows us to update certain sections at a moments notice to keep topics fresh. It also supplies references to related help topics, help tickets (frequently-asked-questions), and external links about theory.

Also, you will be able to search any topic or phrase within our global search which makes what you are looking for faster and easier to find.